Claude Shannon left many memorable memories.
Those who worked with him at AT&T's Bell Labs in New York remember him riding the halls on a unicycle while juggling four balls.
His colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said he had on his desk a gadget of his own creation called the "Ultimate Machine," a box with a button that, when pressed, released a mechanical hand to turn it off.
Not to mention, of course, that at age 21 he wrote "the most important master's thesis of all time," laying the foundation for all future digital computers.
Although at age 32 he published what Scientific American called “the Magna Carta of the Information Age,” since he invented the bit and explained how to compress and send any message with perfect precision.
This is why many, when talking about him, say that Shannon invented the future.
Or rather, the present in which we live.
And they are not exaggerating: their contribution provided the intellectual architecture of the Internet and the digital age.
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“Many people at Bell Labs and MIT compared Shannon's intuition to Einstein's. Others felt that this comparison was unfair…unfair to Shannon,” according to William Poundstone, author of *The Fortune Formula*.
However, his name did not become as well known as those of other famous scientists of his time.
The reason?
Photo credit, Courtesy of the MIT Museum
“Because that’s what he wanted,” said Rob Goodman, co-author of Shannon’s biography, A Mind at Play. “He consciously distanced himself from fame. »
But also because his legacy is relatively intangible.
“It's easy to imagine a computer, but it's harder to imagine the creative leap that demonstrated that switches or circuits could evaluate logical statements,” Goodman said.
“It's easy to imagine a smartphone, but it's harder to imagine the ideas about the nature of information and communication that made that smartphone possible. »
“Shannon worked at this fundamental, intangible level, which is why he is revered by experts but somewhat invisible to the general public. »
A revolutionary discovery
After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1936, Shannon worked as a laboratory assistant for computer pioneer Vannevar Bush, vice president and dean of engineering at MIT.
He helped visiting scientists use the “Differential Analyzer,” the most powerful computer in the world at the time, created by Bush.
This enormous analog machine used a precise system of shafts, gears, wheels and disks to solve computational equations.
To solve each problem, the entire mechanism had to be rearranged so that its movements corresponded to the appropriate equation.
A nightmare?
Not for Shannon.
Photo credit, Getty Images
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From his childhood, in addition to the pleasure he took in solving math problems given to him by his sister, he enjoyed repairing radios, building toys and even transforming a barbed wire fence into a telegraph line to communicate with a friend.
Therefore, for Shannon, spending hours manipulating this complex mechanism was a real pleasure.
And in doing so, the cogs of his mind worked much faster than those of the machine, as evidenced in his master's thesis, Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits.
In Michigan, he earned a degree in electrical engineering and mathematician and took a philosophy course where he discovered the work of 19th-century philosopher George Boole.
This all came to fruition when he observed that the relationship between electrical switches and current could mimic the intellectual process of symbolic logic and mathematics.
The control circuit switches, which could open and close automatically, corresponded to binary choice logic, in which a statement is either true or false.
In Boolean algebra, propositions are assigned the following values: 1 for true propositions and 0 for false propositions.
Based on this theory, Shannon assigned the value “1” to open circuits and the value “0” to closed circuits.
Additionally, in Boolean algebra, statements can be considered in conjunction with conjunctions such as "and", "not", and "or".
So, for example, a sentence like "if your alarm goes off in the morning and it's not the weekend, then you have to go to work" would be the linguistic equivalent of "if the number X is not equal to the number Y, then perform the operation Z" in the switching circuit.
An example of the fundamental relevance of his thesis is that today we can easily recognize that it is about programming a computer.
It was therefore a new idea which, once put into practice, proved surprising: it showed that machines could decide for themselves what to do… just like humans.
Thus, Shannon wrote that "it is possible to perform complex mathematical operations by means of switching circuits", since they could adopt alternative courses of action depending on the circumstances.
With this simple and brilliant method, he delivered “the birth certificate of the digital revolution”, declared Alain Vignes in his book Silicon, From Sand to Chips.
A female “computer scientist”
Shannon had the crucial idea of organizing the inner workings of a modern computer almost a decade before it existed.
But when he spoke with former Spectrum magazine editor John Horgan in 1982, he downplayed the facts.
“It turns out that no one else knew about both domains at the same time,” he said, adding, “I always liked that word, ‘Boolean’.”
“I had more fun doing that than doing anything else in my life,” he told another reporter.
Under the protection of Vannevar Bush, Shannon decided to complete her master's degree with a doctorate.
Bush believed that specializing in a single subject stifled a brilliant mind, so he advised him to do his doctoral dissertation in genetics, according to the MIT Technology Review.
Could you shine even without prior knowledge in the field?
After his work was completed, Henry Phillips, chair of MIT's mathematics department, wrote that Shannon could "conduct research of the first order in any field that interested him."
Shortly after receiving her doctorate, Shannon began working at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
The year is 1940, and Europe is plunged into the shadow of the Second World War, a conflict in which the United States does not wish to become directly involved, but which it perhaps cannot, as will later happen, avoid.
So Shannon immediately began working on military projects, such as antiaircraft fire control and the creation and decryption of codes, including one that Churchill and Roosevelt used in transoceanic conferences.
And there he met the woman who would become his second wife, Mary Elizabeth “Betty” Moore, one of the “computer scientists” at Bell Laboratories.
This was the name given to the people, often women, who used and operated the machines in the IT department to find mathematical solutions through what we today call programming.
Betty was a numerical analyst and became Shannon's mathematics advisor.
The Magna Carta
While working on the war effort, Shannon wrote A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography, completed in 1945 but not published until 1949.
Experts believe he transformed cryptography from an art to a science.
In this work, Shannon explored, among other things, the nature and redundancy of language, themes which he would take up in his masterpiece *A Mathematical Theory of Communication*, a work which he had simultaneously developed in his spare time.
Photo credit, BobTheBryan
Shannon realized that just as codes could protect information from prying eyes, they could also protect it from noise or distortion during transmission, whether due to static or other forms of interference.
Additionally, these codes could be used to package information more efficiently, so that more of it could be transmitted by telegraph, radio, television, or telephone.
He understood that the semantic meaning of a message was irrelevant to its transmission: it didn't matter what he said, the question was how to quantify the information.
To do this, he defined units of information, the smallest possible fragments, and called them "bits" (or "bytes"), a term suggested by his colleague John Tukey as an abbreviation for "binary digit."
To express information in one bit, we use 1 or 0.
Sequences of these bits could be used to encode any message, describing everything from words and images to music, videos and the most sophisticated gaming software.
Although these bursts of bits suffered from the same problems as an analog signal, namely attenuation and noise, digital had an advantage: 0s and 1s were such clearly different states that, even after decay, their original state could be restored much later.
These and other ideas contained in his Mathematical Theory of Communication, such as what he called the "fundamental theorem" of information theory, were prophetic.
A radical concept that would change electronic communications forever.
Like lightning
Shannon, however, was in no rush to publish.
“I was motivated mostly by curiosity,” he explained in a 1987 interview with Omni magazine, adding that the process of writing for publication was “painful.”
He eventually overcame his reluctance, and his groundbreaking article appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal in 1948.
Photo credit, Internet Archive
The effect was immediate and electrifying.
“It was like love at first sight,” recalls John Pierce, one of Shannon's best friends at Bell Labs.
Fortune magazine, for example, called it "an important scientific theory that could profoundly and rapidly change humanity's worldview."
According to Warren Weaver, director of the Rockefeller Foundation's Division of Natural Sciences, this theory encompassed "all the processes by which one mind can influence another," including "not only written and spoken language, but also music, the pictorial arts, theater, ballet, and, in fact, all human behavior."
In reality, Shannon's theory captivated a much wider audience than it was intended for.
Linguists, psychologists, economists, biologists and artists have attempted to merge Shannon's theory with their respective disciplines.
As his popularity grew, Shannon began to worry that his ideas were being used indiscriminately and thus losing their clarity and meaning.
In hindsight, there was no reason to worry: most applications of his theory to other disciplines, such as biology, neuroscience or social network analysis, proved robust and very valuable.
His work was so groundbreaking and so widely disseminated that it would come to be used in myriad areas, from the Internet to the genetic information contained in DNA, even though he formulated it decades before the existence of the spider or the discovery of the double helix.
Regardless, this worry didn't last long.
As the academic community continued to absorb the impact of information theory, Shannon's interests evolved.
He possessed not only a brilliant theoretical mind, but also an extraordinarily funny, practical and inventive mind, notes Jimmy Soni, co-author of A Mind at Play.
So he devoted himself more fully to something that had always fascinated him.
For much of the 1950s, Shannon spent his days in the laboratory imagining and then building ingenious devices.
Some ended up becoming prototypes of what we now call artificial intelligence.
Among them was the famous Theseus, a rat capable of solving a maze by trial and error. Additionally, he could remember the solution, but also forget it if the situation changed and the solution became obsolete.
Or the machine that “reads minds”: with two lights and a button. The player guesses out loud whether the device will turn on the left or right light, presses the button, and one of the two lights turns on.
The success of the machine depended on recording the pattern.
But his motivation was not practical.
“I do what comes naturally to me, and profit is not my main goal. I like to constantly solve new problems,” he once explained.
“I keep asking myself: is it possible to create a machine to do this? Can we prove this theorem? These are the kinds of problems I solve. Not because it will have any concrete use. »
And this was no problem for his boss, Henry Pollak, director of the mathematics division at Bell Labs, because Shannon had "earned the right to be unproductive."
Useless things
Shortly after the publication of his theory, Shannon rejected almost all of the numerous invitations to give lectures or grant interviews.
He didn't want to become a celebrity.
He later began to distance himself not only from the public, but also from the scientific community, worrying his colleagues at MIT, who had hired him in 1958.
“He wrote magnificent articles, when he wrote, and gave magnificent lectures, when he gave one. But he hated doing it,” recalls information theorist Robert Fano in a conversation with MIT Technology Review.
He continued, however, to invent devices, such as his THROBAC, a calculator that used Roman numerals for all calculations, and a portable computer for beating roulette in casinos.
He ventured into poetry with a tribute to the Rubik's Cube, entitled "A column on Rubik's Cubes".
“I spend a lot of time on completely unnecessary things,” he told Horgan.
And other even more useful observations: he developed several mathematical models to predict stock performance and successfully tested them on the stock market.
However, although he gave his all when consulted by colleagues or students, he often spent his time cooped up in his office, and in the mid-1960s he stopped teaching.
His official retirement came in 1978, and Shannon happily went to his "Entropy House," as he called his home on the outskirts of Boston, where his game room was located.
His ingenuity had not diminished: “He was still building things! ", recalled his wife Betty in an interview with MIT Technology Review.
“One of them depicted W.C. Fields bouncing three balls in a drum. It produced a deafening noise! »
The list of his creations is long.
In addition to various machines designed to play abstract games, such as hexadecimal and a robot solving the Rubik's Cube, he made a flame-throwing trumpet, a rocket frisbee, and giant polystyrene shoes for walking on the water of a nearby lake. And many unicycles, in all their variations: one without a saddle, another without pedals, a two-seater, another with a square wheel.
He was rarely seen in public, much to the dismay of his admirers.
But in 1985, encouraged by Betty, he made an unexpected appearance at the International Symposium on Information Theory in Brighton, England.
“It was like Newton had shown up at a physics conference,” said symposium president Robert J. McEliece.
Unfortunately, that same year, he and Betty began to notice some memory lapses, and in 1993, it was confirmed that he suffered from Alzheimer's disease.
His family placed him in a nursing home where he died in 2001.
“Claude did so much to make modern technology possible that it is difficult to know where to begin and where to end,” said eminent engineer Robert G. Gallager, who worked with Shannon in the 1960s.
« Il avait une clarté de vision incroyable. Einstein aussi : cette capacité à prendre un problème complexe et à trouver la bonne méthode d'analyse, de sorte que les choses deviennent très simples. »
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